Essays

As much as Oliver Sacks loved writing (and I do mean the very act itself—filling his fountain pen; starting a fresh yellow pad; whispering words aloud to himself as they came to him), he also loved getting published.

The “getting” part was a big part of it: Even after publishing 13 books and hundreds of essays and articles in his lifetime, Oliver still considered it a privilege to “get” his work in print. (The last piece he saw published, “Sabbath,” appeared in The New York Times just 15 days before his death on August 30, 2015.) His readers might be surprised to learn how little he cared about where a piece of writing first appeared. It did not have to be in the most prominent places—The New York Times, The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books, the holy trinity for writers in the US—though he certainly felt fortunate to have his work appear frequently in their pages. Oliver was just as happy to see a piece he’d written in literary journals such as The Threepenny Review; highly specialized medical journals such as The Archives of Neurology; or commercial magazines with relatively small circulation such as Astrobiology Magazine. Each had its own distinctive audience and, hence, might be enjoyed even more deeply.

Now, 33 of these and other uncollected pieces are in a book—the final volume of the essays of Oliver Sacks, Everything In Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales. Everything In Its Place, like the posthumously published Gratitude (2015) and The River of Consciousness (2017), was co-edited by Kate Edgar, Oliver’s personal editor and assistant of 30 years; Dan Frank, his longtime editor at Knopf; and me, his partner in his last six years. The three of us spent about 18 months reading and rereading (often countless times) well over a hundred pieces and meeting to discuss them frequently.

Unlike the two earlier posthumous books, both of which Oliver had discussed with us before he died, this time around we did not have the benefit of his thoughts to guide us. While he knew there would be one more collection of his work after The River of Consciousness, he ran out of time to organize it before his death. That job he entrusted to the three of us.

In our initial cut, our first question was not what one might expect. We didn’t ask ourselves, What would Oliver want? After all, how could we really know (even though we three knew him and his work best)? But also, there was this: Oliver had a deep respect for editors, whose role is to make judgments, to offer critical comments, to say if something doesn’t work—whether a point, a passage, or an entire piece—or if it unequivocally does.

Writing gave Oliver such joy it was infectious to those around him.

I remember a vivid example of Oliver’s response to editing after he’d submitted the first draft of his memoir On the Move to Knopf. Dan loved the manuscript but delicately told Oliver one thing was missing: He had to “write something about Michael,” his beloved and deeply schizophrenic older brother, whom he had never discussed in public before. Within days, Oliver turned out a whole new chapter, both heartrending and unsentimental, which added further insight into his empathy for his patients—many of whom, like Michael, had been institutionalized or marginalized by their conditions.

For his magazine and newspaper pieces, there were a few “house style” editing conventions that drove him nuts. American publications would always change his very British use of the word “which” to “that.” He never got used to that. Moreover, the NYRB insisted on turning his footnotes into endnotes, which did not sit well with Oliver, an inveterate footnote writer. But that was better than The New Yorker, which forbade foot- and endnotes completely, insisting they either be dropped or incorporated into the main text. (Oliver’s original footnotes were restored for pieces included in the new book.)

So, what was it like to edit Oliver’s work without Oliver present? Well, aside from the most obvious—that we dearly missed him—it simply wasn’t as much fun. Writing gave Oliver such joy it was infectious to those around him. Each stage in the process brought its own rewards: getting the first uncorrected proofs, with their clean white pages of “beautifully” typeset text (which he’d then promptly mark up with an array of multicolored felt pens); then bound galleys—sent out to critics several months before pub date; and of course, the first copies of the finished book itself. As with birthdays, he firmly believed publishing a book called for a celebration—preferably with smoked salmon, fresh herring, Champagne, and plenty of friends.

As my two co-editors and I worked on Everything In Its Place, our guiding principle in selecting pieces was, Is it first-rate—is it as good as anything Oliver Sacks has published in previous books? Fortunately, we had his large, varied body of work as a means of comparison. However, in the case of Oliver’s case histories, this made decisions particularly tough—he had set the bar so high for himself, with pieces like those collected in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, that we knew the case histories included here had to be every bit as strong.

A phrase that often came up for us was that we didn’t want this collection to seem “like a scrapbook,” filled randomly with miscellaneous writings, as anthologies and posthumous collections sometimes do. This is where sequencing the pieces became crucial. We wanted this book to have its own narrative arc, to give a suggestion of Oliver’s entire life’s path. So it opens with his earliest memories—of swimming with his father as a very young boy—and moves on to his boyhood passions—for chemistry, for libraries, for London’s Museum of Natural History. The middle section brings the reader into his life as a neurologist, and functions almost like a book within a book—the 15 last case histories of Dr. Sacks. Everything In Its Place closes with a series of pieces written from the vantage point of an older man, no less passionate than in his early years but transfused with the wisdom of age and experience.

The beloved neurologist and author Oliver Sacks was a man of many enthusiasms — for ferns, cephalopods, motorbikes, minerals, swimming, smoked salmon and Bach, to name a few — but none more so than for words.

When I say he loved words, I don’t simply mean within the context of being a writer of numerous classic books — “Awakenings,” “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” “Musicophilia.” Even if he had never written a single one, I am sure Oliver would still have been that funny fellow who took giant dictionaries to bed for light reading (aided by a magnifying glass). He delighted in etymology, synonyms and antonyms, slang, swear words, palindromes, anatomical terms, neologisms (but objected, in principle, to contractions). He could joyfully parse the difference between homonyms and homophones, not to mention homographs, in dinner table conversation. (He also relished saying those three words — that breathy “H” alliteration — in his distinctive British accent.)

“Every day a word surprises me,” he once commented, beaming, apropos of nothing other than that a word had suddenly popped into his head. Often this happened while swimming — “ideas and paragraphs” would develop as he backstroked, after which he’d rush to the dock or pool’s edge to get the words down on paper — as Dempsey Rice has captured in an enchanting forthcoming film, “The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks.” Back at home, he would often — as he had for years — write thoughts and ideas directly on the pages of books he was reading.

Through much of our six-year relationship I referred to Oliver as a “walking OED” (Oxford English Dictionary) because he could recall spellings and definitions so accurately. And yet he remained modest, never flaunting his extraordinary vocabulary and always deferring to a dictionary for confirmation if in doubt — either the OED, of which he had the full set of 20 volumes, or the far more compact and idiosyncratic Chamber’s Dictionary, a copy of which his favorite aunt had given him on his ninth birthday.

Oliver loved words so much, he often dreamed of them, and sometimes dreamed them up. One morning, six years ago, I found a phrase he’d written on the white board in the kitchen. All it said was “5 a.m. Nepholopsia.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I said while making coffee.

Oliver chuckled, then went on to describe an elaborate dream he’d had that night in which he was stuck on an alien planet where anthropomorphic clouds turned menacing and “murderously” tipped over the Land Rover he was driving — “a cloud nightmare,” he added, as if it were hardly his first. He had written the note upon waking at 5 a.m., so as not to forget it. (He reported his dreams to the Freudian psychoanalyst he saw twice a week.) “Nepholopsia,” he told me, “either means ‘seeing clouds’ or ‘being enveloped by clouds.’” His brow furrowed — wait a moment, now he wasn’t so sure. “Let’s look it up in the good book,” and together we proceeded straight to the OED (“My Bible,” as Oliver, a devout atheist, often referred to it).

There, we found variations on “nephology,” meaning the study of clouds (from the Greek root “nephos”), but no “nepholopsia.” Turns out, he’d accidentally coined the word. We laughed about this, but in fact it wasn’t the first time. Oliver made up “musicophilia,” meaning an intense love of music, which hadn’t existed before he came up with it as the title for his 2007 book. (But he was always quick to point out that “musicophobia” — a hatred of music — had long been part of the English language. He felt that musicophobia appreciated his invention: “Now it has an antonym,” he observed.)

It was this love of words — etymophilia, if you will — and of the act of writing (which he considered a form of thinking) that moved Oliver to tell me one day shortly after I’d moved to New York in the spring of 2009, “You must keep a journal!” It was not a suggestion but an instruction.

I followed his advice straightaway, writing that exchange down on a scrap of paper, which I still have to this day. I hadn’t kept a journal since I was a teenager, but I began chronicling impressions of my life in New York and — when they were just too fantastic to resist — lines spoken by Oliver himself, a near daily occurrence. He was, simply put, chronically quotable.

My New York journal grew and grew as the years passed but I never reread it — not until I decided to write a memoir about my life in New York and with Oliver. I thought reading it would jog my memory. Instead, I found something truly surprising: Parts of the book had already been written — scenes and long stretches of dialogue between Oliver and me — as if they’d quietly been waiting for me to hear them again.

Although Oliver did not live to see me complete that book, “Insomniac City,” I am sure he would not have been surprised that it had its genesis in a journal. After all, many of his own essays, articles and book ideas originated in one of his handwritten journals.

Now, three years after Oliver’s death on Aug. 30, 2015, so many of his words are still with me, still make me smile, still move me. Not long after he received a diagnosis of terminal cancer, for instance, he looked up from his desk one night and said something seemingly out of the blue that I will never forget: “The most we can do is to write — intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively — about what it is like living in the world at this time.”

While he happened to say this to me, I sensed that he also meant it for others, for anyone anywhere who loves words as much as Oliver Sacks did.

Bill Hayes is the author of “Insomniac City,” a memoir that recounts his life in New York City and his relationship with Oliver Sacks.

ONE OF THE realities of living in New York is that you cannot become too attached to specific places any more than you can become attached to certain people in your life: the waitress you chat with every weekend, the parking garage guy, the newsstand vendor from whom you buy a paper. Often, they disappear, and you may never learn why. Why was that building torn down? Why did that bar close overnight? Whatever happened to the bartender? And what about Mohammed? He was here yesterday.

Place is as crucial to the architecture of memory as it is to dreaming, and like those New Yorkers who seem to disappear, spaces themselves carry their own memories here. Departed landmarks like CBGB or the Mudd Club are not so much addresses in downtown Manhattan as they are touchstones in the collective consciousness, occasionally reminding us of what was and of how much has changed — not least, ourselves. CBGB is where a 16-year-old Adam Horovitz — soon to be known as Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys — opened for punk legends Bad Brains in 1982; the Mudd Club is where, a few years earlier, Talking Heads, performing just days after the release of “Fear of Music,” coolly name-checked both spots in the iconic song “Life During Wartime.” (“This ain’t no Mudd Club or CBGB / I ain’t got time for that now.”) Moments like these still haunt the city — half recalled, half imagined — even now that the Mudd Club is a condo building where a unit sold recently for $3.6 million, or CBGB has been colonized by designer John Varvatos, plundering the cultural heritage of the very building he now occupies.

These images are perhaps clearer to those of us who weren’t here to experience them firsthand, whose vision of New York was shaped by stories of and from the disappeared. In 1983, I was in college in Northern California, living in a drab ground-floor apartment just off campus, and on the verge of coming out. Not a place or an age I wish to return to for longer than a flash of remembering. Not a place or an age I wished to be back then either. Where I wanted to be, or thought I wanted to be, existed in the pages of publications like The Village Voice, where photos of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat at Club 57 made New York into a goal, a place to try to reach. In the gay literary magazine Christopher Street, read surreptitiously on visits to bookstores in San Francisco, I glimpsed not places so much as states of mind: the notion of being both openly gay and a serious writer — indeed, of being a gay writer, at the time still a radical thought — as epitomized in its pages by Edmund White, Vito Russo, George Stambolian, Michael Denneny and others.

By the time I actually moved here, in 2009, at age 48, most of those places from the early ’80s (and many of the people) were long gone, as were nightspots I’d only heard about — Danceteria, Paradise Garage and what was once Madonna’s stomping ground, the Fun House. Certain landmarks remained — like the Stonewall Inn, the birthplace of modern gay rights in New York, or the Kettle of Fish bar, once a popular hangout for Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac, and now a sports bar for fans of the Green Bay Packers. Christopher Street seemed to carry the memory of Christopher Street magazine like an aging face carries the memory of its youthful glamour. In the years since that journal started publishing in 1976 and its shuttering in 1995, the city had been ravaged by crack and AIDS, cleaned up and turned outrageously expensive. The past sometimes seeps through, buried as it is beneath layers of time and history, and inevitably, the present suffers by comparison. I am often reminded of this — told this, really — by people my age who lived here through all those years.

AND YET I dismiss such wistfulness privately. New York isn’t what it was, true; it is something different. But whatever its faults, different is always interesting. To get too attached to New York is to invite the city to break your heart, over and over again.

When I moved into my current apartment, I had a view of the Hudson River; in certain seasons, I could see the sun set on the water on some nights. Then, one day six years ago, I noticed construction starting down near the waterside. I watched over the next year as a building went up, floor by floor: the new Whitney Museum. It was being built on burial grounds of a sort: the meatpacking district, a neighborhood populated in the ’80s by butchers and truckers during the day, and, at night, by gay men spilling out of bars and sex clubs like the Mine Shaft and Anvil, all long since vanished, replaced by restaurants and retail stores.

The Whitney now blocks my view of the water almost entirely, like a gigantic thumb. But however indifferent I feel at times about the art exhibited inside, I’ve come to think of the museum as lovely. Even so, I don’t take it for granted. One day, another building will rise and block out my view of the museum. Until then, I try to appreciate what I see from here — like the rays of tangerine-colored sunlight that bounce off the Whitney’s pearly facade in the evening — without comparing it to what was there before. Because what is is what matters most. What was will only make you blue in New York.

I took many pictures of Oliver Sacks during our life together — and not just because I adored him. He was an irresistible subject for a photographer, with his bushy beard, sparkling bespectacled eyes, expressive hands, gaptoothed smile and the athletic build of someone who could easily swim long distances, even into his 80s.

The last picture I took of him, however, captures something quite different. His eyes do not meet mine, his head rests on a propped hand, and he is completely absorbed in a Bach piece he’d been learning to play.

I made a print and showed it to him a couple of days later. He didn’t find it especially flattering, but he liked it. It reminded him of the engraving of an elderly Beethoven in the “Oxford Companion to Music” from 1938. He knew that book practically by heart — a favorite aunt had given it to him as a boy — and he could describe the illustration and its caption with perfect recall: Beethoven’s room is “untidy,” he told me, “and there sits the aged composer, ‘very ill, but indomitable.’ ”

I nodded, his words echoing in my head: very ill, but indomitable — yes.

When Oliver Sacks died on Aug. 30 of last year, at 82, the world lost a beloved author and neurologist. I lost my partner.

Oliver hated that term: partner. “A partner is what one has in business,” he would say, bristling, “not in bed, not in the kitchen next to you making dinner.” The man was nothing if not meticulous about words. We’d never married — never wanted to — so “husband” was out, and “companion” was too euphemistic. Oliver was old-fashioned: He preferred the word “lovers.” We loved each other; that said it.

Thinking back on my life with Oliver, two episodes from his last year come to mind, each revealing something of the private and public Dr. Sacks. The first took place at home in late November 2014, two months before he learned of his terminal cancer diagnosis. Read the rest of this post »

I SAW a girl on a Manhattan-bound subway train one day wearing a knockoff Louis Vuitton head scarf and false eyelashes long enough to make a daddy longlegs envious. Her look — a sort of Sally-Bowles-does-Brooklyn — was complete with a matching knockoff L.V. handbag and umbrella. She was seated next to a young man who was as dashing in his way as she was adorable, but she took no notice of him as she was completely absorbed in a paperback titled something like “Becoming a Practical Thinker.”

I had an impulse to tear the book from her hands.

“Don’t do that,” I wanted to say. “Practicality will not get you where you want to go.”

When you go — not if, but when (and soon, by the way; the show closes Sept. 21) — I suggest you bring a thesaurus. Because it wasn’t long before we found words failing us. An image of an acrobat caught midleap on a Manhattan street, for instance, struck the three of us as the epitome of “amazing.” So did another photo. Then another. Upon seeing the first few dozen of the more than 175 prints on view we pledged that we would not use that word to describe every single photo. Beautiful, incredible, joyful, strange, very sad — we made it as far as the second room before we were back to the A’s.

I started writing this essay five years ago, and then I stopped. That I was not able to finish the piece did not strike me at the time as ironic but as further proof that whatever I once had in me — juice, talent, will — was gone. In any case, completing it would have made moot the very point I was attempting to make: Not writing can be good for one’s writing; indeed, it can make one a better writer.

I hadn’t given up writing deliberately, and I cannot pinpoint a particular day when my not-writing period started, any more than one can say the moment when one is overtaken by sleep: It’s only after you wake that you realize how long you were out. Nor did I feel blocked at first. Lines would come to me then slip away, like a dog that loses interest in how you are petting it and seeks another hand. This goes both ways. When I lost interest in them, the lines gradually stopped coming. Before I knew it, two years had passed with scarcely a word.

MY 30-year-long subscription to The New Yorker ran out a few months ago — pure absent-mindedness on my part — and since then I buy a copy each week at the smoke shop around the corner from my apartment.

It makes no sense financially. I could save 73 percent off the cover price if I renewed for just a year; even more for two. But I’ve found I enjoy the benefits that come with my $6.99 a week, beginning with Ali, the shop’s manager.

Ali had formerly known me as a customer who occasionally came in late at night for a single vanilla Häagen-Dazs bar and asked for a book of matches. The asking part is important. He once told me about a customer who reached over the counter for a book of matches from the box next to the register:

I say “I”; it was my email account, but it felt — feels still — deeply personal. It started on a Tuesday at exactly 7:20 a.m. E.S.T. I know because I received a text message at that time saying that my email password had just been changed. If I had made this change, I need not “take any action.” But if not, “click this link.”

I was bleary, jet-lag weary, having returned the night before from 10 days’ traveling in Europe, but I was quite sure I had changed nothing but my sheets since getting home. Right then, a message from a friend popped up on my Facebook page delivering the news that something was amiss: “Just received a strange email from you asking for money. Change your password.”